tin ore from the granitic bedrock; precious stones were spewing from the estuaries of Borneo; and from Java came pepper, slaves and rice (the latter a vital necessity, for Srivijaya only ever had a limited agricultural hinterland of its own). From even further afield there was fragrant Timorese sandalwood. Cloves and nutmeg came from Maluku, and at the very furthest limits of the network, Melanesian hunter-gatherers in the islands off western New Guinea, living lifestyles little changed since their distant predecessors had had that unnerving encounter with the Flores Hobbit, found that there was a foreign market for the fabulous feathers of the greater bird-of-paradise.
Srivijaya did not own or even loosely control all of this: it simply tapped into it. Arab travellers would later report that its kings had ‘tamed the crocodiles’ of the Straits of Melaka. This was probably not meant to be taken literally, for it was human rather than reptilian predators that the kings really had at their beck and call. They had harnessed the wiles of the piratical Orang Laut, the Sea People, and it was they, haunting the mouth of the Musi River, who were able politely to oblige any passing ship to detour upriver to the capital. But despite their paramountcy within Southeast Asia, the Srivijaya kings were happy to play the role of deferent vassal when it came to an even greater regional power. From Jayanasa’s days onwards Srivijaya sent regular tribute to China, where local scribes recorded it as yet another barbarian fiefdom acknowledging the mastery of the Chinese emperor.
Given this tradition of tribute missions sent from Srivijaya, it might seem strange that it was India, rather than China, that set the cultural tone in the Archipelago. But in fact China’s highly advanced political structure probably counted against it in this respect. In India there was no overarching control and no enduring institution of centralised power, and this may actually have fuelled the stream of cultural influence that seeped from its underbelly into Southeast Asia: the place was as leaky as a sieve. China, meanwhile, had storied thrones and imperial capitals, and over the centuries the whims of the centralised courts would render the country virtually schizophrenic in its relationship with the outside world. China would sometimes fling open its door to trade and travel, only to slam it furiously shut a generation later; it would unleash its own armada of monopolising seamen onto the Southeast Asian trade networks, only to haul them home and scupper their boats after a few voyages. The tribute system with which Srivijaya complied was in fact often the only way to continue trading during a bout of Chinese xenophobia. Shipments of Srivijayan ivory, birds’ nests and spices would be accepted as ‘gifts’ by the port officials of Canton, and the favour would be returned in the form of metals, porcelain and silk.
All told, Srivijaya survived for some six centuries, but by the dawn of the second millennium CE it was already in decline—probably partly due to an inability to keep pace with the changing moods of China. As power at the centre began to wane, the outermost vassals of the Srivijayan network would have begun tentatively to test the waters with a few overlooked tribute missions and unacknowledged regal missives, and then, very swiftly, the threads would have snapped as outlying entrepôts reasserted their outright independence. The network contracted. Raids by bullying outsiders began to wrack the capital, and in 1025 the Cholas—a swaggering mob of pirates from South India whose economy was founded on plunder—sacked Srivijaya and many of its one-time vassals along the Straits.
At the end of the eleventh century the centre of the dwindling power shifted north from the Musi to the hub of Srivijaya’s former vassal, Malayu, near the site of the modern city of Jambi. There was a last flurry of temple building, with an array of red-brick monuments thrown up on the banks of the Batang Hari, but the flame was guttering. Before long it had gone out altogether.
By the time the Muslim sultans of Palembang established their own riverine kingdom on the Musi in the sixteenth century, neither they nor their subjects had the faintest idea that the ruins of a mighty state lay buried in the thick black soil beneath the foundations of their own city. But the Palembang sultans were, in their own small way, inheritors of a tradition of semi-divine kingship that had originated in Srivijaya—as were all the other kings of the Archipelago. Their common subjects, too, owed a considerable debt, for their own mother-tongue was a language that had first emerged from Jayanasa’s realm. Southern Sumatra was the original wellspring of the Malay language, and it had been Srivijaya’s dominance of the shipping routes that had first fuelled its spread as the lingua franca of the Archipelago, a role that it still claims today in its updated form as Bahasa Indonesia, the national Indonesian language, and the near-identical modern Malay spoken in Malaysia, Brunei and Singapore.
In the thirteenth century China suffered one of its periodic catastrophes: the Mongols swept southwards and usurped imperial power, overturning the old systems of tribute and diplomacy. By the 1360s, however, Mongol power itself had dissolved. As the courtiers of the new Ming Dynasty attempted to rebuild the Middle Kingdom, someone had the bright idea of calling in overdue tribute obligations from the islands of the distant south. In 1370, a full seven hundred years after Yijing’s visit, an ill-informed Chinese diplomatic mission went looking for San-Fo-Qi.
Following the old monsoon trade winds, the officials eventually arrived in Jambi—to the astonished delight of the local rulers, who had long since gotten used to their own obscurity. They eagerly agreed to resume the tribute missions of old. Over the coming five years several embassies to China set sail from Jambi. The excitement rather went to the head of the local king, a man by the name of Wuni, and he began to believe that there might still be some flicker of life in the Srivijaya corpse. In 1376, he sent a request for Chinese acknowledgement as maharaja of a revived Srivijaya, and recognition as the greatest tributary chief in the Archipelago. In far-off Nanjing, the Ming officials had not yet grasped the real state of affairs in Southeast Asia, and the next year they sent a mission to acknowledge Wuni’s improbable request. Unfortunately for the Chinese, they had reckoned without Java, the real centre of power in the fourteenth-century Archipelago. Before the Chinese reached Jambi, the Javanese got wind of the affair. They dispatched their own fleet, which tracked down the mission ship and slaughtered all the Chinese diplomats, before descending on Sumatra to teach the upstart Wuni a pertinent lesson and to obliterate whatever modest trace might remain of the magnificent Srivijayan heritage.
When word of the incident reached China, the Ming officials reacted with remarkable pragmatism. Instead of attempting to extract some sort of revenge for the death of their diplomats they decided to forget all about Sumatra, and to award the exclusive status of tributary to the Javanese king who had ordered the killing from his seat on the island that would be the lodestar of the Archipelago forever more.
CHAPTER 2
EMPIRES OF
IMAGINATION:
HINDU-BUDDHIST
JAVA
The plateau lies in the belly of an old volcano, 6,500 feet above sea level in the heart of Java. This is a broken landscape under a cladding of cold soil and pine trees, and there is still a smell of sulphur in the damp air. The name of this strange place is Dieng.
Sometime in the seventh century the first Shiva-worshipping temple builders came struggling up through the tiger-haunted forests to reach this spot, dragging their stonemasons’ tools and their Indian-inspired blueprints. But they were not pioneers in an untrammelled world, for Dieng’s name—Di Hyang, often translated today as ‘Abode of the Gods’—is older than any Sanskrit-speaking arrival. Hyang is an ancient Austronesian concept of deity.
In far-flung corners of the Archipelago even today, away from the influences of India and Islam, mountains are the abode of ancestral spirits and fiery gods. From Gunung Dempo in Sumatra to the tricoloured crater lakes of Kelimutu in Flores, volcanic summits have always been sacred. As the seventh-century builder-priests paced out the plots
